Paris, France — The City of Paris decided today to explore possibilities to sue the fossil fuel industry for causing climate damages, following the example of New York and other US cities.

The city council also decided to lobby other major cities such as London to ban fossil fuels from their investments through the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, of which the mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo is president. The council also announced that it will release an update on the progress that has been made since it pledged to divest from fossil fuels in 2015.

“It’s fantastic news that cities like New York and Paris are stepping up to protect their citizens and hold fossil fuel corporations accountable for the harm they cause. This is a major breakthrough for divestment campaigners around the world that have been pushing cities to take a stand against the polluters wrecking our climate,” comments 350.org France Campaigner Clémence Dubois. Fossil fuel companies like Total, Shell, BP, and Exxon are the driving forces behind more and more severe flooding and summer heat waves in Paris, as well as droughts, wildfires, unpredictable seasons and rising sea levels hitting people across the globe.”

This winter, Paris has been hit once more by severe flooding, which the mayor said was, alongside recent summer heat waves ‘clearly a question of the town adapting to climate change’. Studies found that the flooding that submerged Paris in May 2016 was made almost twice as likely by human-made climate change.

On 10th January, the mayor of New York City Bill de Blasio announced that the city will divest its $191 billion pension funds from fossil fuels and that it has filed a lawsuit against BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips for climate damages.

The moves by New York and Paris, paired with mayor Hidalgo’s pledge to increase efforts to persuade other major cities to divest, raises the pressure on the London where mayor Sadiq Khan has so far disappointed campaigners to take a strong stand against the fossil fuel industry and deliver on his election pledge to divest London City Hall.

Major cities such as Sydney and Cape Town as well as numerous European capitals including Berlin, Oslo, Copenhagen and Stockholm have already pledged to ban fossil fuels from their investments.

The divestment campaign to get public institutions to cut their financial ties to the fossil fuel industry started in 2012 with the aim to erode public acceptance for the companies most responsible for causing the climate crisis. To date, over 800 institutions including universities, faith and medical groups, the heirs to the Rockefeller oil fortune have taken steps to divest.

Building on these achievements, the Fossil Free campaign is gearing up to launch a new wave of local action around the world to keep fossil fuels in the ground and accelerate the shift to community-controlled renewable energy.

“The Fossil Free movement is taking things to the next level in 2018,” said May Boeve, 350.org Executive Director. “Building off the global fossil fuel divestment movement, which successfully led over 800 institutions to divest over $6 trillion in assets from fossil fuel companies, we’re kicking into high-gear supporting local campaigns around the world working towards a world free from fossil fuels and enacting a swift and fair transition towards renewable energies for all. It is high time for governments worldwide to follow the people’s demand for a fossil free world.”

121 thoughts on “The City of Paris goes full stupid – considers climate lawsuit over flooding”

Sounds to me like a good fight back tactic would be to eliminate the sales of Gasoline, Oil, Heating Oil, Natural Gas and Fossil Fuel produced Electricity within any city limit that wishes to divest from fossil fuels thereby helping them to divest 100%. All those NY Cabbies would need to leave the island daily to refuel.

I think a price increase to cover the anticipated legal expenses would be more appropriate; and they shouldn’t be coy about, maybe run a newspaper ad explaining why fuel in Paris went up 1/2 a Euro/L !

This absolutely needs to happen. The virtue-signalling, latte sipping chattering classes of the metropolises who have no clue as to where there food or power come from will never stop voting in these lunatics until they have their stupid noses rubbed in some consequences. Make the consequences so and it stops.

How can BIG oil be blamed in the age of Trump? Anything that happens anywhere is Trump’s fault. Or worse, what Melania is wearing today! Light reflected from Melania’s dress causes climate change in Paris.

Well you can’t have any trucks using evil fossil fuels delivering or picking up either. Three days with no truck traffic and NYC would be on it’s knees with it’s many deranged citizens evacuating. Be interesting to see the city devolve back to the state where they had tremendous problems with horse manure in the streets.

Time for some counter suits against these cities who would deny their citizens cheap reliable energy. Value of the suits = incremental costs of the citizens. Enough playing defense, time to go on the offense

Russia supplies a large portion of the natural gas and petroleum used in Europe, so if the French want to be logical, they should add Russian fuel suppliers to the suit. See, it’s Putin’s fault.
Then watch the EU scream when Russia closes the gas and oil pipelines and diverts their gas and oil to China, Korea, Japan, etc.
And they should add Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran, Nigeria, Norway, the UK, the USA, etc. as defendants. Might as well get every fuel supplier in the World to cut them off. A triumph for the Green advocates.

No, Kuma. You have to account for the very real possibility of improved flood controls. That’s something that I don’t like about this very post. For example, remember that during Hurricane Harvey, Central Houston had significantly less flooding than several non-hurricanes in the early 1900s. This was due to huge reservoirs and drainage systems that we built to combat these very sort of situations.

Secondly, don’t forget that the judge and jury are already biased against them due to the situation, so the defense will actively have to prove a negative. What a defendant would have to do in this case is reverse the accusation and show that the French Flood Control board (or whatever it’s called) inappropriately controlled the river. In short, accuse them of using “climate change” as a cloak to hide their own negligence. This is what we’ve done in prior posts on this very site.

But, but, but THIS flood was twice as likely so it’s not the same as all of the others: (my bold)

These approaches involve statistical analyses of the historical temperature record, the trend in a global climate models, regional climate models, and the results of thousands of simulations of possible weather with a regional climate model. Applying multiple methods provides scientists with a means to assess confidence in the results.

You also need to factor in that France, in general, and Paris in particular, has been governed by increasingly progressive ideologues, and subsequently expenditures on real things, like infrastructure, have suffered. Many of the canals are clogged with garbage. A couple years ago one of the canals was finally cleaned only because it ran through an upscale neighborhood, and the natives were restless. They took 40 tons of garbage out, everything from motorcycles to mattresses, and a lot of just plain litter.

40 tons? To be frank, in a waterway of any length, that’s trivial. I’ve never dredged a river or creek, but when I dredged my ponds, we got over a million pound per acre of mud, dirt, and debris. That’s the level of cleanout you need, as it’s the mud that clogs your drainage, not the refuse.

Spot on Bob. There are very good geological and topographical reasons why the Seine basin, centred on Paris, floods regularly, particularly with regard to the impact arising from the confluence of other major rivers joining the Seine further upstream. As you have demonstrated, before the basin got increasingly concreted over as the city expanded, major flooding occurred regularly. That it does now, is not a surprise to anyone with even a smidgeon of historical knowledge. It is, perhaps, a greater surprise that the flooding isn’t even worse because of modern land use changes. I’d be interested to know how the citizens of Paris could possibly survive today without the assiatance of ‘Big Oil’ energy and products in dealing with the consequences of a flood. Probably not quite as well as the citizens of 1649, 1651, 1658,1690…… etc, etc

It’s just the usual dog and pony show by the urban useful idiot cheerleaders. No one with a functioning bran cell pays them any attention but seemingly the voter inertia in urban centres is always with them nevertheless.

Well, here in Oregon – after the gas tax and the bail-out healthcare tax – NOW Kate Brown is ram-rodding through a California style cap-and-trade.
And I have no doubt the progressive idiots in this state will pass it without a blink.
These pockets of eco-idiocy are like cancers, just waiting to metastasize once the second they regain national power.
Of course, in the meantime, you just have a consolidation of the coastal port states.

Precisely. Having been placed on notice that there is a claim of damages, said damages being compounded by the continued sale of the offending product, it would only be prudent for the defendant to cease the claimed pernicious activity, so as to limit actual and punitive damages in the event the case is settled/adjudicated in the plaintiff’s favor…10 years or so from now.

If France gets a cold or snowy winter, they’ll be glad to have some natural gas to heat their homes. If the Russians turn off their spigot, how about a little LNG “made in USA”?

France, to its credit, does not rely on fossil fuels for electric power. They get 80% of their electric power from nuclear fission, and most of the rest from hydro, which works very well in a heavy rain.

Remember, it was the French who coined the expression “apres nous, le deluge” (after us, the deluge).

I attempted to leave the following at their web site but keep getting an HTTP ERROR 405:

“Apologies, first, that my comment must be in English, as I have no facility with the French language. If the people of Paris wish to sue fossil fuel producers for damages, it will clearly be prudent for said producers to immediately cease delivery of their product so as to limit any potential civil damages, since such cases can take many years to adjudicate and they will surely not wish to compound their losses in case the plaintiffs prevail. I wish the people of Paris good luck in heating their homes in the winter and cooking their meals.”

All that has happened is that Northern France has got some of the winter rain that normally falls in Southern England, giving floods in the relatively flat former region, and relative “drought” in the latter.

The French should be thanking the fossil fuel companies for a relatively mild winter, and a re-filling of their water reservoirs.

It’s not stupid. It’s a proven method to deprive people of money they earned. We use it daily in the USA with lawsuits over drugs and side effects, mesothelioma and anything else one can come up with to sue for. America has used this method for 40 years or more. Easier than raising taxes. Higher probability of success. France is just catching up.

With any luck, they’ll bankrupt the REAL power companies and have endless riots on their hands. For all I know, that may even be the goal. Or maybe it’s just greed. Never underestimate greed.

What is so stupid about some politicians finding someone to blame for their failures? That is their entire modus operandi. All of them. Find good things to take credit for ( Al Gore/ internet), and find others to blame for your screw-ups. Call me a cynic but then show me a single instance where they did otherwise.
Telling the truth gets you nowhere in politics or climate “science”! Or religion. AGW is a mixture of three kinds of lie-based human mindsets. Probably multiplicative rather than additive. One derangement excites the others.

I don’t understand why they want to sue the energy providers. The providers don’t burn the stuff they sell, they provide a service to individuals and entities that burn the energy. They should be suing the people who purchase it and drive their cars, or the people who burn it to heat their houses.

Of course I’m assuming that the ‘YOU’ in this equation benefits from government handouts or support, and uses fossil fuels or the products of them (food using fertilizer, plastic clothes, plastic anything, any electricity (try making some without using oil somehow), roads, anything transported (try transporting without oil), etc etc etc).

When the precursors of 350.org statrted to attack the resource companies back in the 80s and 90s, most companies simply went with the flow, didnt fight back, and several became “green”. It is now recognised by those same companies that response was a major mistake, reduced their rights under law, and lead to regulatory overreach which has been difficult to reverse. The current push is simply from the same songsheet. The lesson is to fight now.

Exactly. To simply argue that Paris has flooded before is certainly true, but ignores the basic insanity lying at the root of the claim.

That territory must never be ceded to the crazies, because they aren’t going to go away any time soon. The green ratchet works because so many people and corporations too often take the lazy approach and merely kick the can down the road. But the crazies come back with even more outrageous claims and demands because nobody put their foot down with the earlier claims.

The most effective fight would involve not just lobbying of governments, but educating the public about the REAL state of climate science. The fossil fuel companies have been climate cowards. Both Tim Ball and Mark Steyn have had to deal with expensive lawsuits, and I’m surprised Anthony Watts hasn’t been targeted (yet).
Did any of the oil majors even bother to supply any amicus briefs regarding what they know about the true state of climate change? It’s pretty obvious they haven’t spent anything useful for education of the public.

I have no sympathy for them, whatsoever. I’m GLAD they’re getting sued.

Some of the climate loons want to put us in jail. I wonder: if Anthony Watts found himself in jail over his sins against the climate change religion, would Exxon Mobil, e.g., have made a peep? I think not…..

Hodgkins et al. report that “there was no compelling evidence for consistent changes over time in major-flood occurrence during the 80 years through 2010,” adding that “the number of significant trends in major-flood occurrence across North America and Europe was approximately [equal to] the number expected due to chance alone.” Consequently, they conclude that “compelling evidence for increased flooding at a global scale is lacking.”http://www.co2science.org/articles/V21/feb/a3.php

Unfortunately the Dams were nearly full at the time of the rains and, as such, needed to open the flood gates to remove the possibility of damage to the dam structures. Just one of those lack of proper prior planning cases.

I remember reading a previous post about CA’s Oroville dam and the failure of the reservoir operators to keep the reservoir from topping over and not having any margin for when more water arrives. As I recall one commenter mentioned that if you had to use your spillway it meant you hadn’t been doing your job and usually lead to dismissal.
Parisian politicians cannot sue nature for raining. They can’t recover any damages from themselves for not operating their safeguards.So….it must be somebody else’s fault.

True, in Oroville it was the emergency spill way that failed as well as the primary, but the commentor mentioned that long before you are using the primary spill way you should be running more outflow through the pen stocks. Failure to watch upstream flows and anticipate the obvious is what caused the issue.
Stay ahead of the curve so to speak.

I”m tired of all this sturm und drang over suing fossil fuel companies. Let’s go to court and settle this charade once and for all. My guess is it will never go that far and that would suit the perpetrators just fine so they could continue their shaming unabated.

Oh no. I think oil resellers should immediately require a get-out-of-jail card from the city before they refuel bulldozers.

Actually, why not, as others suggested, just totally refuse to sell fuel to the city until they agree that they’re not going to sue the reseller.

No, this is ridiculous again. I think the case is there just to be able to say they’re investigating so others can spin that. Theyre not going to do it. It would be something that made conservatives really annoyed that could give dynamite to already quite active populist center-right in Europe.

The usual word for populist center-right in Eyrope is ‘racist’. The usual word for red green ex-communist is ‘center-left’.

And of course, they’ll be wearing their expensive Patagonia and North Face clothing made of various plastics and fabrics that are petroleum based. Made in China and shipped great distances to their favorite high end store in a liberal, Trump hating city.

Another reason why this is a self-inflicted piece of Parisian fruitcake thinking lies in the giving up of regular dredging of rivers. I believe, but may be wrong, that neither the Seine nor the Thames are dredged as regularly as they once were. Unsurprisingly, this makes flooding more and more likely as time goes by. Dredgers were once an everyday sight on the Thames, but I can’t recall seeing one in recent times.
It probably would be impossible for the oil companies to boycott providing a major city with their fuels, which is a shame in that they would only need to do this once to wake people up.But there would be deaths from the resultant chaos and the Eco-loons would blame everyone else while urging suing big oil.
On the other hand a drama documentary illustrating our reliance on oil and the uselessness of renewables would make for a compelling film, “The Day the Oil Tankers didn’t come”. Now that would be an educational programme the big oil companies could produce showing them taking a city at its word in not wanting fossil fuels. “What do you mean green energy doesn’t work if it is night and the wind isn’t blowing” demands some mayor. Scarier than any Al Gore twaddle.

Good observation, and totally correct. There is little dredging of the Thames these days. So, you have a meandering, silty river and estuary system left alone for years, what happens? It silts up and leads to more flooding.

EU regulations are preventing much river dredging on the pretext of protecting wetland habitats I believe. Had we someone with more than a single functioning neuron and more spinal column than a sea cucumber in Britain’s driving seat at least we would now tell them where to shove their idiotic regulations.

Based on the paleoclimate evidnce and the work that has been done with models one can conclude that the climate change we have been experiencing is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has no control There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and plenty of scientific reasoning to support the idea that the climate sensivity of CO2 is zero. So the party ot sue over climate change is Mother Nature. Lots of luck on collecting on a judgement against Mother Nature.

Very smart.
The lawyers know to always go after the big pockets. It’s what they do. The entity being sued doesn’t necessarily have to have any link to what happened.
All they have to do is try to make the defendant unpopular to get a payout.

“The City of Paris decided today to explore possibilities to sue the fossil fuel industry for causing climate damages” makes about as much sense as “The US Democratic Party decided today to explore possibilities to sue the Russians for causing their candidate Hillary Clinton’s election loss”. Both statements are equally delusional.

Over the last 11 years the Cape Town water supply dams have been full 6 times. This year they are about to run dry as happened a number of times since the City was founded and a water supply was formed, 350 years.

This time our mind numbingly incompetent political class has found a new reason for their inability to plan and build ahead, Man Made Climate Change. Cape Town being the national headquarters for the terminally gormless Politically Correct brigade just blames the west in general and Big Oil in particular and the lie is swallowed.

“The divestment campaign to get public institutions to cut their financial ties to the fossil fuel industry started in 2012 with the aim to erode public acceptance for the companies most responsible for causing the climate crisis. To date, over 800 institutions including universities, faith and medical groups, the heirs to the Rockefeller oil fortune have taken steps to divest.”

You people lack basic knowledge of finance and economics. The divestments have no impact on oil companies. They do not own these stocks. The impact is on the investors who own them. The fact you sold $6 trillion worth of stocks means there are more investors willing to buy them. The oil companies are happy that their new stockholders are not hostile. They really want to get rid of you anti-fossil fuel investors. So you are giving them a favor by divesting. If you want to cut financial ties to the fossil fuel industry, stop buying gasoline and electricity! Simple as that

I hate to be picky, but retirement funds own a large chunk of large companies. When a major investor blacklists your stock, your market shrinks. Investors will still buy, but at a lower price.
The lower price hurts the company’s ability to obtain loans at low interest rates. Banks use stock price as an important determinate of loan risk vs. reward.
I understand that one fund may not make that much of a difference. But if NY, CA and a few others follow suit, it would.

Low stock price hurts the stockholders not the company. Banks don’t use stock price in granting loans. They use credit ratings to assess credit risk. They look at recurring net income, free cash flow, debt to asset ratio, current ratio, debt service coverage ratio of the company.

Companies don’t normally trade their own stocks but low stock price is an opportunity to repurchase their stocks. They can get a loan to repurchase stocks. The benefit of this is interest expense is tax deductible but dividends are not, it’s an after income tax item. There’s tax savings in paying interest rather than dividends. Plus treasury stocks are deductible to retained earnings. The company can reduce dividend payout and use the cash for business expansion without borrowing from banks thus avoiding interest expense. There’s also opportunity for capital gains. When the stock price increased, they can resell the stocks in the market for profit.

Back in 2002, I received a threatening email from a furious man who said he held me personally responsible for the flooding of Prague. Yes, me! Flooded Prague! Amazing!

I pondered my new-found powers, which I did not know that I possessed, and replied:
“Yes Sir, you are entirely correct! I am the One, personally responsible for the flooding of Prague! Now “buzz off” – or I’ll do it again!”

That seemed to solve the immediate problem, but it appears that I tempted the Fates, and have now unwittingly unleashed the deluge on Paris.

Having God-like powers is serious stuff!! You’ve got to be really careful what you think, and especially what you say. You never know quite what’s going to happen next – you can’t drink alcohol or smoke dope or even allow yourself to get angry – it’s really a lot more restricting than people think! Whew!

The whole concept is ridiculous. It is not the fossil fuel industries which cause CO2 emissions. The emissions are entirely caused by the end users, the people or companies which buy the fuels and burn them. In fact the ultimate end user is the consumer who heats and lights his home and drives a vehicle. I look forward to the first such law suit coming to court because the company or companies being sued can afford the best lawyers who will destroy the case, setting a precedent which will deter this type of litigation being repeated. That’s before even considering whether there is any convincing evidence that climate change caused the flooding of Paris, and whether said climate change was caused by fossil fuel CO2 emissions. Then maybe the citizens of Paris can sue their local politicians for misusing their tax money to finance a spurious lawsuit. Where does it end?